Andrea Di Vita – författare

This book offers an accessible overview of the diverse approaches being pursued to make fusion energy a reality. Rather than diving into the underlying physics or speculating over future predictions, Nuclear Fusion: At Last? focuses on what can be known today: the technologies, the experiments, the challenges, and the players shaping the field.Organised into four parts, the book begins with a broad introduction to fusion before presenting a clear, structured overview of the major approaches, complete with up‑to‑date snapshots and profiles of key public laboratories and private companies in the field. Chapters explore the cross-cutting scientific, engineering, and safety issues every fusion concept must confront, including radiation protection and non‑proliferation. The text concludes with a discussion on economics, outlining the market realities and uncertainties that will influence the future of the industry.With minimal mathematics and a balanced analysis of pros and cons for each approach, this book empowers readers to critically evaluate and understand the real, current trajectory of fusion research.Whether you're curious about the science, intrigued by the technology, or watching the emerging fusion economy, this is an essential guide to this rapidly evolving field.Key FeaturesAn accessible introduction to different approaches in nuclear fusionDiscusses the latest technologies advancing the field and their pros, cons, and problemsMinimal mathematics, making it accessible to a general audience without formal, scientific backgrounds

This book offers an accessible overview of the diverse approaches being pursued to make fusion energy a reality. Rather than diving into the underlying physics or speculating over future predictions, Nuclear Fusion: At Last? focuses on what can be known today: the technologies, the experiments, the challenges, and the players shaping the field.Organised into four parts, the book begins with a broad introduction to fusion before presenting a clear, structured overview of the major approaches, complete with up‑to‑date snapshots and profiles of key public laboratories and private companies in the field. Chapters explore the cross-cutting scientific, engineering, and safety issues every fusion concept must confront, including radiation protection and non‑proliferation. The text concludes with a discussion on economics, outlining the market realities and uncertainties that will influence the future of the industry.With minimal mathematics and a balanced analysis of pros and cons for each approach, this book empowers readers to critically evaluate and understand the real, current trajectory of fusion research.Whether you're curious about the science, intrigued by the technology, or watching the emerging fusion economy, this is an essential guide to this rapidly evolving field.Key FeaturesAn accessible introduction to different approaches in nuclear fusionDiscusses the latest technologies advancing the field and their pros, cons, and problemsMinimal mathematics, making it accessible to a general audience without formal, scientific backgrounds

The importance of thermodynamics, particularly its Second Principle, to all branches of science in which systems with very large numbers of particles are involved cannot be overstated. This book offers a panoramic view of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Perhaps the two most attractive aspects of thermodynamic equilibrium are its stability and its independence from the specifics of the particular system involved. Does an equivalent exist for non-equilibrium thermodynamics? Many researchers have tried to describe such stability in the same way that the Second Principle describes the stability of thermodynamic equilibrium - and failed. Most of them invoked either entropy, or its production rate, or some modified version of it. In their efforts, however, those researchers have found a lot of useful stability criteria for far-from-equilibrium states. These criteria usually take the form of variational principles, in terms of the minimization or maximization of some quantity. The aimof this book is to discuss these variational principles by highlighting the role of macroscopic quantities. This book is aimed at a wider audience than those most often exposed to the criteria described, i.e., undergraduates in STEM, as well as the usual interested and invested professionals.